“The point is less about how vendors don’t fix the problems, and more how the vendors’ fixes are going un-applied by users, corporations, and governments.” “The high amount of code reuse across UEFI BIOSes means that BIOS infection can be automatic and reliable. “Because almost no one patches their BIOSes, almost every BIOS in the wild is affected by at least one vulnerability, and can be infected,” Kopvah says. System Management Mode also has access to memory, which puts supposedly secure operating systems such as Tails in the line of fire of the implant. The devious part of their exploit is that they’ve found a way to insert their agent into System Management Mode, which is used by firmware and runs separately from the operating system, managing various hardware controls. Their exploit turns down existing protections in place to prevent re-flashing of the firmware, enabling the implant to be inserted and executed.

Kallenberg said an attacker would need to already have remote access to a compromised computer in order to execute the implant and elevate privileges on the machine through the hardware. The vulnerabilities, which they’re calling incursion vulnerabilities, were so easy to find that they wrote a script to automate the process and eventually stopped counting the vulns it uncovered because there were too many. By infecting this core software, which operates below antivirus and other security products and therefore is not usually scanned by them, spies can plant malware that remains live and undetected even if the computer’s operating system were wiped and re-installed.Īlthough most BIOS have protections to prevent unauthorized modifications, the researchers were able to bypass these to reflash the BIOS and implant their malicious code.īecause many BIOS share some of the same code, they were able to uncover vulnerabilities in 80 percent of the PCs they examined, including ones from Dell, Lenovo and HP. The BIOS boots a computer and helps load the operating system.

Now we have a research presentation about it. We’ve learned a lot about the NSA’s abilities to hack a computer’s BIOS so that the hack survives reinstalling the OS.

Control 4 license hack